John Flavel ended his days on the 26th of June, 1691, at Exeter. He had, before his death, left the town of Dartmouth, the scene of his long and zealous ministrations, because the rabble, headed by certain aldermen, in 1685 paraded the town, carrying the good man’s effigy to be burnt,—an insult he revenged by praying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” With his lively imagination he combined intense spiritual emotion, and the following story, which he relates of himself in his Pneumatologia is so curious that, though familiar from frequent quotation, it deserves to be inserted here. It exemplifies a phase of spiritual life belonging to an age which has passed away.[212]
“Being on a journey, he set himself to improve his time by meditation; when his mind grew intent, till at length he had such ravishing tastes of heavenly joys, and such full assurance of his interest therein, that he utterly lost the sight and sense of this world and all its concerns, so that for hours he knew not where he was. At last, perceiving himself faint from a great loss of blood from his nose, he alighted from his horse and sat down at a spring, where he washed and refreshed himself; earnestly desiring, if it were the will of God, that he might there leave the world. His spirits reviving, he finished his journey in the same delightful frame. And all that night passed without a wink of sleep, the joy of the Lord still overflowing him, so that he seemed an inhabitant of the other world. After this, an heavenly serenity and sweet peace continued long with him; and for many years he called that day one of the days of heaven, and professed he understood more of the life of heaven by it, than by all the discourses he had heard or the books he ever read.”[213]
1691.
Richard Baxter was an old man at the time of the Revolution, weighed down by suffering; and the Toleration Act came too late to give scope to energies which, had the event happened twenty years earlier, would have been ardently spent in tilling the newly-opened fields of labour. Yet, when the adoption of the Doctrinal Articles of the Church was required as the condition of exercising a Nonconformist ministry, the trembling hand of the veteran theologist could not resist an impulse to write down scholastically the sense in which the Articles were to be subscribed. It was his own sense, yet it was also, as he believed, one in which many of his brethren concurred. Few, it is said, took notice of his explication, and at this we are not surprised, as his explication contains more in the way of suggestive thought than of explicit definition. His metaphysics, warmed by zeal for practical religion, appear distinctly in this farewell effort. He has something abstruse to say as to the glorified body of Christ, and upon some other points; and he lays down a dictum, often repeated since in a wider sense than he specifies, with regard to legislation in Church and State: “God’s laws are the supreme civil laws, man’s laws are but by-laws.” He also insists upon the doctrine of the Apostle James, as well as the doctrine of the Apostle Paul; and, after charitably saying, “all were not accursed that hoped well of Socrates, Antonine, Alexander, Severus, Cicero, Epictetus, Plutarch,” and others, he adds, “there is no name, that is, no Messiah, to be saved by, but Christ.”[214]
NONCONFORMISTS.
1691.
In a tenement near his friend Sylvester’s, in Charterhouse Square, Baxter spent his last days; and when disabled from preaching in his friend’s meeting-house, he preached in his own dwelling, almost dying in the exercise of his favourite employment. “It would doubtless,” it is said, “have been his joy to have been transfigured on the Mount.” “He talked in the pulpit,” as one reports, “with great freedom about another world, like one who had been there, and was come as a sort of express from thence to make report concerning it.” His busy pen was employed as long as he could grasp it with his fingers, in writing something for the benefit of his fellow-men. At last growing infirmities confined him to his chamber, and then to his bed. There his vigorous mind “abode rational, strong in faith and hope, arguing itself into, and preserving itself in, that patience, hope, and joy, through grace.” With unaffected humility he spoke of himself as a sinner worthy of being condemned for the best duty he ever did, whose hopes were all “from the free mercy of God in Christ.” Reminded of the good which his works had produced, he replied, “I was but a pen in God’s hands, and what praise is due to a pen?” When extremity of pain constrained him to pray for release, he would check himself with the words, “It is not fit for me to prescribe;—when Thou wilt, what Thou wilt, and how Thou wilt!” “Oh! how unsearchable are His ways, and His paths past finding out; the reaches of His providence we cannot fathom! Do not think the worse of religion for what you see me suffer.” He had assurance of future happiness, and great peace and joy in believing, only lamenting that because of pain he could not express all he felt. Still he spoke of heaven, and quoting the Apostle’s description of the celestial Church, remarked, that it deserved a thousand thousand thoughts. With characteristic width of sympathy, he spent many of his last hours in praying for a distracted world, and a divided Church. Physical pain, his old companion, continued to the last. “I have pain,” he said, “there is no arguing against sense; but I have peace—I have peace.” The catalogue of his diseases is enough to excite pity in the most inhuman, and our sensibilities are positively tortured by the pathetic descriptions he gives of himself. They illustrate the beautifulness of his oft-quoted answer to the question, How he did?—“Almost well.” “On Monday, about five in the evening,” says Sylvester, “Death sent his harbinger to summon him away. A great trembling and coldness awakened nature, and extorted strong cries, which continued for some time;” at length he ceased, waiting in patient expectation for his change. The gentle cry in the ear of his housekeeper, “Death, death!” betokened full consciousness at the last moment, and turning to thank a friend for his visit, he exclaimed, “The Lord teach you to die.” About four o’clock on the morning of the 8th of December, 1691, he had done for ever with the sorrows of mortality, and entered on the saints’ everlasting rest. His body sleeps in Christchurch beside the ashes of his wife and mother. Many vied in doing honour to his memory. Conformists as well as Nonconformists carried him to the grave, and made great lamentations over him; a train of mourning-coaches reached from Merchant Taylors’ Hall—whence the corpse was carried—to the place of burial.
NONCONFORMISTS.
At the commencement of the year 1692, another of the old Puritans left this world. He represented a class which had borne the brunt of the battle, and who, when the Revolution brought peace, loved to relate stories of sufferings which promoted Dissent, after the severer laws against it were relaxed.
Francis Holcroft, son of a knight residing at Westham, near London, was sent to Clare Hall, Cambridge, where Dr. Cudworth was Master, and David Clarkson a Fellow. Under the instructions of the latter, the gownsman became a Puritan, and as, on a Sunday morning, he sat over the College Gate, in a chamber which he shared in common with young Tillotson, described as “his bed-fellow,” he sometimes observed a horse, which was brought up for one of the Fellows, who served the living of Littlington, and which was frequently led away without its master. Pitying the sheep without a shepherd, the young Puritan offered to supply the neglected parish, where his services were crowned with signal success. Promoted in 1655 to the Vicarage of Bassingbourne, he became exceedingly popular, and, not content with the effect of his sermons, he felt anxious to establish ecclesiastical discipline, and therefore formed a Church upon Congregational principles. At the Restoration things changed. Holcroft was ejected, and the sheep were scattered. He met them as he could, some in one place, some in another; but the circuit of his labours becoming too wide for his failing strength, he arranged that four members should assist him in pastoral work. Worship was disturbed by the beating of drums, and the pastor was imprisoned; but the greater the persecution the more his popularity increased, and when silenced as a preacher, he sent pastorals round his wide rural diocese. For some time the congregations to which he ministered, formed of Baptists and Pædobaptists, constituted only one Church; but after the Revolution they settled down into distinct communities. The memory of Holcroft still lingers in the neighbourhood of Cambridge, and old barns in which he ministered were pointed out a few years ago. He died on the 6th of January, 1692. Before his departure, spiritual tranquility, awhile disturbed, was happily restored, for he died exclaiming, “I know that if the earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved, I have a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” He sleeps in a small burial-ground beside the churchyard of Oakington, four miles from Cambridge. Three flat stones cover the spot hallowed by the remains of two other Nonconformist ministers, as well as his own. Over his resting-place are inscribed the appropriate words, “They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.”